What do Americans think of Trump’s Abortion comments?

Donald Trump’s statement that women who seek unlawful abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment” is more extreme than all but the most outspoken pro-life advocates. The Republican frontrunner, who once described himself as “very pro-choice”, changed his stance after taking criticism from pro-choice and pro-life groups alike, leaving voters unsure of what to make of the candidate’s position on this controversial issue.

To gauge public reaction to Trump’s stance on abortion, researchers at Unanimous A.I. used a method called “Swarm Intelligence“ to capture the collective sentiment of the general public. Unlike polls, where everyone responds in isolation, swarms are real-time systems where the participants “think together” to converge upon a unified response that best reflect reflects the collective perspective.

In this case, 70 randomly selected voters were asked to swarmon a series of questions about two potentially divisive issues – Trump and abortion. First, the swarm was asked whether or not it agreed with Trump’s original statement:

As you can see, the 70 users were able to find consensus in just seconds that they “totally disagreed” with Trump’s statement. Given that the candidate himself has reversed course so many times over the past week, the swarm was asked to guess Trump’s true feelings about what to do with women who seek unlawful abortions.

Here again, you can see that the swarm was able to express itself in seconds, revealing its belief that Trump’s original statement was the most accurate picture of the candidate’s opinion. But, what would the swarm make of all of the controversy around Trump’s evolving opinion? Is the waffling just political double-speak, or does it show the nuance required to talk about a complicated issue?

In the end, the swarm believes this is just an example of “Trump being Trump.” That might sound like a dismissal of the candidate as a serious political contender, but if the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that millions of his supporters across the nation want nothing more of Trump than to be himself.

Want to be part of a swarm?Great. Swarms are forming to explore topics of all kinds from politics and sports, to movies and music. If you’d to be a BETA TESTER for the UNU swarming platform, just fill out the form below.